“At the Herald Sun, we’ve taken the plunge. Finding success with chatbots is as much about the technology of hooking up to content feeds as about nailing what chatbots are about. Our objective with the chatbot is engagement. The more helpful it is and the more it connects with our audience, the more we hope they use it for both actively seeking news and passively getting news. We’ve found increased Facebook engagement leads to subscription increase, so a chatbot is a natural fit.”

“The ultimate goal for Privacy Broker is to effectuate users’ control choices across our tech stack. It will provide scale and a reliable communication platform to communicate the privacy choices of users to relevant services that process the personal data of end users. It will also guarantee the privacy choices are honoured by all relevant services within a certain time period. “

There were two elephants in the room on Tuesday, during the future-of-native-advertising session at INMA World Congress 2017. The first was native advertising itself, about which many traditional publishers have been ambivalent because of the resources it demands and the editorial ethics it challenges… The second was Google. One of its senior executives was taking the stage — just after her company had been roundly bashed by a loudly applauded morning keynote speaker, who characterised Google (along with Facebook) as an unfair industry-killing duopoly.

“Johannessen’s advice for other publishers: “If you have a meter model, experiment with the meter. If you have a freemium model, you can experiment with a share of locked articles. And remember you can always be dynamic.”

“The thing that we found,” Wafford continued, “is that there were almost a million customers each month who were systematically abusing the Google First Click Free policy. They were going back and forth, copying headlines, and basically reading The Wall Street Journal for free. … So we made a conscious decision to turn Google First Click Free off — after a lot of conversations and a lot of tests, I should hasten to add.”